Post Daddy Issue

Post Daddy Issue, 2016, digital video, 8 minutes.

This work for the short documentary Post Daddy Issue focuses on a collection of narratives from women who are discussing the relationship that they share with their biological fathers. I started a discussion with my creative partner, Lei Wang, about how women who have complex relationships with their fathers are marked with having an issue. This “issue” then stigmatizes how others define their womanhood. As a response we came up with the theory Post Daddy Issue. This is the idea that family should not be defined on the placement and assurance of a father figure in the household. Despite our fathers not being present in our lives, this does not mean that the current state of our family is incomplete. Our womanhood and the future relationships we hold with men are not determined by the formative relationships with held with our fathers. We created four portraits for four different women, including ourselves, and then overlaid it with unsynchronized sound. When we first presented the project to the women used in the documentary, they were extremely confident and certain about their feelings towards their fathers. They assured us that they too agreed that they were in the phase of being Post Daddy Issue. While the women in the visual portraits appear to be concrete and confident, the audio recorded separately gives a great juxtaposition to the piece. The audio was recorded with all four women in the room together and one by one confidence grew an intimate connection with vulnerability.